Each month Adriana Beal answers questions submitted to her via email or through LinkedIn.
1. When I finish the requirements document for a project, sometimes it may take months for it to get approved. How can I get stakeholders to sign off on my requirements faster?
A common advice you’ll find in books and from trainers and consultants is to reduce the size of the requirements documents, splitting it into smaller, more “consumable” chunks that can be reviewed and approved faster. While this is a useful tip, it’s far from the only steps you should take to avoid getting into this situation. This checklist can help you more effectively avoid this trap.
2. Is it worth it to start learning to be a business analyst now? What is the future of BA jobs?
The practice of business analysis is not going away any time soon. I get contacted all the time by companies going through “digital transformation initiatives” asking if I’d be available to provide business analysis consulting services and help them build a new team of BAs. And after this phase of transformation, new rounds are bound to happen. Despite the significant advances in AI, humans are still considerably better than machines to deal with uncertainty and ambiguity, and knowledge workers capable of identifying the right problems to solve and determining the best solutions involving the right combination of tech/people/processes will continue to be in demand.
On the other hand, low-value business analysts (the ones classified as “unconsciously incompetent” in this article I wrote for Modern Analyst: How are top-performing business analysts different than an average BA) are unlikely to have a place in the future job market. A BA who is only capable of capturing the requests submitted from business stakeholders will be easily replaced by a machine. To succeed in business analysis, the best advice hasn’t changed over the years: develop the right skillset and follow Steve Martin’s recommendation: “Be so good they can’t ignore you.”
3. Are business analysts only responsible for creating business requirements documents or are they also responsible for meeting notes, action items log, decision log etc. when a project manager is also assigned to the project? And what are your thoughts on BA involvement in testing?
It is a fact that in many organizations, BAs are treated as a low-status, “catch all” staff that end up being assigned to all sorts of tasks that PMs and software developers are not interested in doing, from project coordination and status reporting, to data mapping and software testing. These are not business analysis activities, though, and ideally, analysts should only be managing the requirements and contributing to acceptance planning and other relevant activities meant to ensure the solution being delivered fulfill the requirements and is fit for purpose.
Sometimes it’s not possible to avoid “blended roles”, like the ones in which the same person is responsible for both software requirements and project management or testing. Still, since many talented BAs tend to feel the same way, it’s smart for managers to protect the BA team against being used as “all purpose staff” to prevent the most skilled analysts from applying to their jobs or jumping ship as soon as they find an opportunity elsewhere that allows them to focus on the core BA duties, which could be summarized as:
- identify the business problems that need to be solved or the opportunities that can be capitalized on;
- elicit the objectives the organization is after and determine, analyze, document, and validate the needs of the project stakeholders;
- identify the risks that will keep the team from being successful, the assumptions about the objectives that might derail the project, and the requirements to ensure the team constructs the solution that delivers success;
- work in lockstep with the business and IT stakeholders to enable alignment between the two organizations, so that the solutions delivered achieves the desired business outcomes.
As to being responsible only for business requirements, this is not the case for most BA roles. In addition to the high-level business requirements that set the context for the benefits a business hopes to achieve from undertaking a project, analysts are typically responsible for documenting project scope, stakeholder and user requirements, and the software requirements specifications that are used by software developers to implement the specific bits of system behavior that support the business requirements.
Also recommended:
New offering: 3-month full-access to the Business Analysis Leadership library